A new Late Etruscan dedicatory inscription from Populonia. The marble fragment, perhaps from an altar, was found in the vicinity of one of the three temples on the city's acropolis.

From back in September, Phil Perkins, David Ridgway, and Corinna Riva talk to Melvyn Bragg about the Etruscans on BBC Radio 4's "In Our Time".

A report on the 'inauguration' of the site of the Samnite sanctuary of Hercules at Campochiaro, near Campobasso.

The ongoing struggle against looting and antiquities traffickers continues:- 77 individuals accused of involvement in a crime ring operating out of S. Sosti near Cosenza in Calabria; more than 1000 objects and 4000 coins seized.- At the other end of the country, near Bolzano, three dinosaur eggs were among the 6400 paleontological objects seized from smugglers.- A piece of an architrave stolen from the Terracina Museum in 1959 was discovered in a bar in the north of Rome, as were various other things.

There's a bunch of artifacts from Molise (as well as Athens and Macedonia) on display in Thessaloniki for the exhibition "The Gift of Dionysos," including an ivory plaque with the head of the god, from Saepinum (image above). It runs through September of 2012. [ArcheoMolise]

A tombarolo from Ancona was arrested at Guardialfiera in Molise recently. Along with his metal detector and digging implements were found fragments of a bronze plate. [Primo Numero; ArcheoMolise]

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

The authors of a forthcoming article in Archaeometry use a new approach to assign values to the ambiguous Etruscan words sa and huth (4 and 6, respectively). The abstract follows:

The graphical and linguistic interpretation of the first six Etruscan numerals has long been confronted with the ambiguous assignment of the words huth and sa to either 4 or 6. Here, we show how the systematic combinatorial analysis of the numerals appearing on ancient southern Etrurian dice dated from the eighth to the third centuries bc, together with the careful comparison of the results with the only two existing dice carrying the alphabetical translations of the numerals conserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, finally allows unambiguous mathematical resolution of the linguistic riddle, allowing the firm attribution of the numeral 6 to the graphical value huth and 4 to sa. Combinatorial analysis of the numerals distribution on the six faces of the die shows that only two of the 15 possible numerical combinations were actually in use in southern Etruria, and that during the fifth century bc there was a marked shift from the typical (1–2, 3–4, 5–6) combination used in the early seventh- to fifth-century bc dice to the (1–6, 2–5, 3–4) combination used at later times and still largely adopted today. The largest body of archaeometric data on dice specimens from Etruria is presented, based on macroscopic examination, X-ray diffraction, DRIFT spectroscopy and density measurements.

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

I note the online presence of the Periodico di Mineralogia, "an international journal of mineralogy, crystallography, geochemistry, ore deposits, petrology, volcanology, and applied topics on environment, archaeometry and cultural heritage," based at La Sapienza. There's no explicit statement of open access, but all the issues from 1999 to 2010 are freely downloadable.

Sunday, January 30, 2011

There will be a conference at Brown titled "The Archaeology of Italy: The State of the Field 2011," March 18-19, 2011, organized by Jeffrey Becker and Sue Alcock. John Robb will deliver the keynote address.

The Joukowsky Institute will host a weekend symposium in March 2011 whose aim it is to discuss the current state of the archaeology of peninsular Italy in the twenty-first century, with an emphasis on the North American academy. With an interest not only in tracking the trends and methodologies in use in the archaeological investigation of this very important piece of the Mediterranean, the symposium also seeks to examine the place of peninsular Italian archaeology with respect to other geographical subfields of Mediterranean archaeology. Perhaps most importantly, the symposium will discuss not only the current state of the field, but also explore possible future directions, methodologies, and techniques to be employed.

The symposium will feature three sessions, one dealing with the current state of research, another future directions in research, and a third that will serve as forum for graduate students to discuss their own research and network with graduate colleagues and faculty. The organizers are seeking graduate student participants whose main research focus is the archaeology of peninsular Italy, broadly defined.

The next day sees conference "Gods in Ruins. The archaeology of religious activity in Protohistoric, Archaic, and Republican central Italy" open at Oxford, March 20-22, 2011, organized by Ed Bispham and Charlotte Potts.

This conference will present the results of current or ongoing work on archaeological evidence for religious activities in central Italy prior to c.200 B.C.. By bringing together early-career academics, postdoctoral researchers, and advanced postgraduate students working on different aspects of material culture ranging from art history to archaeozoology, the conference aims to advance scholarly debate on cult activities in periods, places, and phenomena under-represented in the literary sources.

Speakers from Italy, Greece, Belgium, The Netherlands, America, and the United Kingdom offer delegates the opportunity to discuss work in progress in a variety of countries. Papers will address, among other topics, human sacrifice and ritual killing in Etruscan culture; the economic activities of Italic sanctuaries; Etruscan werewolves; maenadism in Etruria and Campania; and bronze Apennine votives. All papers will be delivered in English.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

In lo, these many months, not one but two new issues of ArcheoMolise (ISSN: 2036-3028) have hit the stands. They are, as always, freely available as zipped pdfs from the CERP-Isernia website. I'm not sure why they don't offer tables of contents online; I suppose the zipped-only format may point to bandwidth restrictions, even in this day and age? It makes them opaque to search engines, though, so I offer contents here. They maintain a Twitter feed with recent archaeological news both local and global. The ArcheoMolise Facebook page has all of the same, with an added agitationist/activist editorial voice condemning neglect and abuse of cultural heritage of Molise

In any case, the contents of ArcheoMolise no. 5 (July - September 2010):

I note from the "Agenda" at the back of no. 6 that you have until January 31 to visit the exhibition "Il Dono di Dioniso. Mitologia del vino nel Sannio pentro e frentano" at the Museo Sannitico in Campobasso.

Still kicking. I finally updated the back-end of Tria Corda to the 'new' (as of a few years ago) Blogger templates. Some of the colors are darker (foreshadowing, perhaps?), and the rounded edges are gone. None of that nonsense from here on out. The classic marbled background and the delightfully Latinesque — some would say flippant — title image remain, however.

Sporadic Italic blogging is all that can be expected — that and a few words on the AIA/APA, and of course the latest offerings from Archeomolise, thereby confirming our crypto-Molisano agenda.